The original fearsome facial hair.
Yup, Sergio Romo will get a bobblehead this year.
The facebook page that announced the event got 200-plus comments. The following sampling represents the entirety of those comments. Even Romo himself agreed.
Wow, I thought ads in U.S. sports were getting out of hand — you can hardly see Mr./Sr. Yoenis Cespedes after he whomps the ball.
Oh, and for all us non-Spanish speakers, just a moment after the advertisement disappears, we can hear a proper pronunciation for “Cespedes.”
In my mind (which is largely the only place I hear wOBA or WAR or BABIP pronounced), I have been saying ces-PED-ees. But it sounds more like the pronunciation might be CES-peddehz real fast-like, y’know, to make it look like you can actually with comfort speak a second tongue.
Well, congrats to Cespedes. How’s it feel to blast homers knowing each additional majesty-arch (a fancy new name for home runs) is like a crank on the cash register (except cash registers don’t crank anymore — plus team rarely pay from cash registers anymore; most use simple Funds Devices that transfer paychecks directly to the nearest Cadillac dealership)?
It feels good, I imagine.
Wait, I definitely recognize one of them. Maybe that other guy seems vaguely familiar.
Buried in the Minneapolis Star Tribune story titled “Ex-Twins Dickey, Slowey scale Mount Kilimanjaro” is this nugget:
While Mets management tried to discourage Dickey from the arduous pursuit, the Rockies were fine with Slowey going ahead.
Update: The voting is closed. Old Hoss Radbourn, quite properly had the most votes with 94. We’ll use that as a baseline, assuming no one could be foolish enough to not vote for him. 75% of 94 is 70.5. We’ll round down to 70. Which means that our inaugural Ron Swanson Baseball Hall of Fame class is as follows:
Old Hoss Radbourn, 94 votes
Ty Cobb, 89 votes
Nolan Ryan, 80 votes
Jeff Bagwell, 70 votes
Lou Gehrig, 70 votes
Frankly, that seems reasonable. You win this round, John Locke.
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When our country was born, our founding fathers mistakenly bestowed upon us a republic, in which the will of the people would determine the course of our nation, rather than an enlightened despotism based on the whims of Ron Swanson, as Thomas Hobbes had been advocating all along.
And so, since our Belovéd Swanson is barred from ruling by decree due to the Constitution and the fact that he is indeed fictional in nature, it falls to us, the multitude, to choose for him who belongs in his Baseball Hall of Fame. I don’t like it any more than you do, but such is the will of John Locke, who fricking ruins everything.
Yesterday, you recall, we proposed several candidates. Today, we will choose the introductory class for the Ron Swanson Baseball Hall of Fame. Everyone on the original list I proposed, as well as those players and managers both nominated and seconded in the comments section are available for your vote, and you can vote for multiple candidates. As with the regular Hall of Fame, a candidate requires 75% of the vote to make it in, unless no one achieves that threshold, at which point, we’ll just give it to the top three vote-getters or something. It should be chaos…glorious chaos…which will demonstrate once and for all how stupid John Locke was.
Wherein I take the easy way out and post this video, which, among other things, is the best Atlanta Braves advertisement ever, and probably NSFW (unless you work at a strip club).
“Nama biru” is Japanese for “draft beer.”
Go to Jingu Stadium in Tokyo for a game — it’ll cost you half as much as the Tokyo Dome, and you’ll get to see the same game.
You know what will stick with you? The little things. You see, they have baseball in Tokyo, but they don’t call it that. They call it basebaru. Same thing, but a little different. Maybe it’s the metric system, or maybe it’s just society.
The beer experience fits right in — baseball with a little dash of shoyu.
Recently, I finished reading The Art of War, the famous work of Chinese general Sun Tzu. Although the goal of Sun Tzu’s writings is to educate the generals of his state of Wu in the art of defeating large armies of people, potentially with deadly force — something not too similar to baseball, given the non-contact nature of the sport — some of Sun Tzu’s thoughts on the competitive and strategic aspects of war actually apply quite well to this fine sport. Here are a few selected items which people in various positions in baseball could find useful.
For the manager assessing his team:
He first of all considers the power of his army in the bulk; afterwards he takes individual talent into account, and uses each men according to his capabilities. He does not demand perfection from the untalented.
It is key both for managers to understand the strength of their teams relative to the league as well as the bits and pieces individual players bring to the table. This passage seems particularly applicable to platoons — the strong manager does not demand each hitter hits lefties and righties equally well, and instead uses two players to the best of their abilities when possible.
The Josh Reddick of my mind has been very busy. First, he was all optimistic. Then he was all pessimistic. And he’s still in there knocking around.
What he’s done to cope is this: change up his styling. Each look represents how he’s feeling at the moment. Each look plays with line, texture and depth. Each look is a snowflake. Each look has a motto.
So, I was reading Dayn Perry’s highly informative post yesterday about putting your baseball hat in the dishwasher. Of course, I had to turn to Google to find out the answers to some burning follow-up questions, like:
(1) Can I also put a glove in the dishwasher?
(2) How about a bat?
When I discovered a truly horrifying piece of news from last summer that doesn’t seem to have gotten the attention it deserves.
Klout is perhaps the stupidest thing to happen to social media, it in itself not exactly high art. If you haven’t heard of Klout, it allows you to see how “influential” you are on Twitter and Facebook based on some kind of algorithm Klout probably makes up as it goes along. I myself am a 53, whatever that means.
One of the other, mostly insane, things about Klout is that it allows you to give other Twitter users a +K…again, whatever that is…designating their mastery of some subject, presumably as a sign to other Klout users as to who they should go to to decide what movie to see, or what car to buy. Thanks to my idiot co-blogger on The Platoon Advantage and heterosexual life partner, Bill, and his efforts, I am decidedly an expert on “Moms” (tread lightly, fellows, for the mom I’m an expert on could be your own).
And the best part is, it keeps track of you whether you sign up for it or not!
Anyway, here are the overall scores for your favorite baseball-related Twitter feeds (higher is better), and the other ridiculous topics on which your favorite people are also influential, according to Klout: Read the rest of this entry »
